Oh oh – another castle of king david about to be unveiled…

News is out that the secret Iron Age site which was reported awhile ago with an “Proto-Aeolic” (or “Proto-Ionic“) capital, is about to be “outed” this Friday. While this is nice news, the current news reports that a castle of King David will be revealed are somewhat hard to accept, since, to start with, such capitals, while known from the Iron Age, always derive from later phases of the Iron Age, long after the late 11th/10th cent. BCE.

So, while I would love that a castle of King David be found – including, if possible, a bath in which Bathsheba herself bathed – I’m rather sceptical that this find will be in anyway related to King David – save for the fact that it is most probably connected to a royal structure of the Kingdom of Judah (ruled by David’s descendants) at later stages of the Iron Age.

In any case though, this is an interesting find and I wait to hear more details.

UPDATE: Yuval Gadot (TAU) has kindly informed me that this site was recently published by Daniel En-Mor in volume 7 of “New Studies in the Archaeology of Jerusalem and its Region” and was presented at this annual meeting a few months ago. In the article, which Yuval kindly sent me, the site is in fact a very nice, Iron Age II water system, which has a hewn column with a proto-aeolic capital within it. So, as I thought – nice site from the Iron Age, but no connection to David – and in fact, not even a castle…

Aren

P.S. Last year, when I was in San Diego, I missed a tour of the site that the discoverers arranged for some senior archaeologists in Israel.